FANTASY AS REALITY – A LOOK AT BEN OKRI’S INCIDENTS AT THE SHRINE

Realism is often considered synonymous with the actual.  Literature which mirrors life is looked upon as realistic.   Fantasy, more often than not, is considered the opposite of realism.  Fantasy, thus, for all practical purposes, is fictitious.  The fact that fantasy is meant to suggest the really real is the burthen of this paper.  With the modern writers, fantasy, through its story-shaped-worlds echoes the reality at the substratum, that which is silenced, unrevealed and concealed.  Fantasy, has thus become the reality in a new clothing.  Ben Okri is a contemporary Nigerian fantasy writer who has used the Nigerian political arena as the landscape of his works.  Not only his novels but also his short stories are fantasy writings.  which take us to the basis of the really real.  In this article an attempt has been made to analyse the structure of fantasy in his short stories.       John Clute and John Grant in their The Encyclopedia of Fantasy have theorisedon the Grammar of Fantasy.  According to them, a complete fantasy work should have the four units: Wrongness, Thinning, Recognition and Eucatastrophe.   They postulate that from these intensive structures, fantasy takes its birth.  Okri’s three short-stories in the collection Incidents at the Shrine have been taken for analysis. Okri presents the contemporary political and social turmoil in Nigeria through a fantasy structure, as, for him, fantasy is the substratum of the bizarre real illusion, and an exposure to it is the solution for and remedy to the ills of life. This paper analyses how Okri’s fantasy novel stands for the Nigerian reality.